Tangled
by Chomjangi
Summary: My thoughts on why Claire refuses to let us know her last name...


Title: Tangled  
Author: Chomjangi  
Rating: PG-13, to be on the safe side.  
Spoilers: Whole first season, specifically Pilot, Catevari, Reunion, and The Lesser Evil  
Summary: Oh what a tangled web we weave...the author's explanation for how Claire came to work for the agency.  
Disclaimer: If I owned The Invisible Man, Aquamama would be fishfood, Arnaud would be in every episode, and a new side effect of quicksilver would make it impossible for Darien to wear shirts at any time.  
Author's note: It's been a while since I've posted, having been tangled up myself between school, working on my school newspaper, and keeping up with all the traffic on these lists (yeah!).   
In any case, if we've learned anything after eight years of the X-Files, it's that no one is who they seem. After TLE, I've been thinking about why Claire is so adamant that no one knows her last name (sorry, I don't buy the whole 'keeping her privacy' thing). Here's my take on why she wants to keep this information a secret, especially from Darien.  
  
***  
  
Tangled  
by Chomjangi  
  
I'm still in love with you.  
  
It's coming up on a year now, but I still wake up sometimes in the middle of the night surprised to find myself alone in bed. Expecting to find you laying next to me, asleep on your side, one leg thrown over my as we recline, tangled underneath the sheets. Before dinner I set the table for two, without thinking, forgetting that you won't be coming home. Your clothes are still hanging in the closet. Your books are still on the shelves. Some part of me wants to imagine that you're coming home again.  
  
So I continue, day after day, haunted at work and haunted at home by the parts of you that still live on. My therapist tells me that I need to move on with my life, but it's so hard, especially since I feel like your ghost is still following me from heartbeat to heartbeat.  
  
I was going to tell Darien. I knew I had to, after I made the decision to stay. With every day I put it off, it grew harder to stomach, harder to imagine what would happen when he knew the truth.  
  
When Arnaud led him to believe that you were alive again, I thought I had my opportunity. I knew that you were dead; I'd seen your body, recognized every scar and every inch of you. But I couldn't tell your brother that. I let him run off, risking his life to try and find you, justifying my silence by telling myself that I would let him know the truth as soon as we had laid you to rest again.   
  
He came in, the night after they found your body, buried twenty paces from your grave, while I was analyzing his papers. I wanted to tell him right there. I wanted to let him know that my heart was just as torn apart as his. I asked him to come to dinner with me; he declined. He went instead to put your body back where it belonged; a task which I watched, from behind a grove of trees, as he and Hobbes laid you back to rest.  
  
He called me later that night.  
"Where else do they store files besides in the archives?" he asked.  
"Lots of places," I said, "I suppose the official would be able to tell you. Why, what do you want to know?"  
"I want to see my brother's file," he said, softly.  
I could have told him them that a copy of his brother's file from the agency was sitting underneath my bed in a shoebox, along with our marriage license, our wedding rings, a few portraits we took together that I couldn't bear to keep around the house.  
"Why?" I asked.  
"I talked to my aunt today. I told her that Kevin was dead." He was silent, for a moment. "She told me something about him that I didn't know."  
"What," I heard myself saying.  
"He was married," Darien said. "He was married, and he never even told me."  
We were both quiet for a moment.  
"I'm sure he had his reasons," I said.  
"I wonder if she knows?" Darien asked. "I mean, his widow. Did The Official call her? Does she know where he's buried?"  
"Why don't you ask The Official that?"  
"I did. He said that she was being provided for."  
I sighed. "Then why don't you let it be?"  
"My brother's gone," he said, after a second passed between us. "The woman he loved is the only person left who really knew him."  
After I hung up the phone, I lay down and broke into tears.  
  
I went to a sleep clinic, to see if they could stop my dreams. Every night I relive the day that you died; the lab at the DOD, the samples I was supposed to analyze that day. Staring through the microscope of the slight curve of red blood cells when the assistant came in, telling me that there was a phone call for me on line one. It was urgent.  
  
The black car waiting for me at the bottom of the steps. The Official was standing outside, holding the door open for me as I got inside. He got in the back seat next to me and stared straight ahead, watching the hairs on the back of Ebert's neck rise and fall as we drove into the desert.  
"Do you remember meeting Arnaud DuThiel?" he asked, after a while.  
"I think so," I said softly. Then I asked, "Was he the one?"  
The Official didn't say anything, just turned to look out the window.  
"Preliminary reports indicate that Darien Fawkes was able to escape unharmed." I didn't care. All that mattered to me was the fact that they had killed you.  
The car stopped and they took me into the compound, where agency relief workers were packing away bodies and clearing rubble from the grounds. The midday sun beating down on us let the smell of rotting flesh begin to linger towards us as we made our way through the white-suited men into the shade of an overhand. At one of the first doors inside the compound, The Official stopped, allowing Eberts to remove a ring of keys from his coat pocket to open the door.  
"We moved most of the bodies up here," he said, "we still have teams running searches on the lower levels."  
  
The interior of the room was almost cold, air conditioning running. Tables and chairs were pushed against the walls, forming impromptu gurneys and sawhorses to support body bags and stretchers. They had set you apart from all of that, laying your body on a cot in the far corner of the room. There was a sheet draped over your face, but I knew it was you.  
"I'm sorry, Claire," The Official said. After that I didn't hear him.  
  
On the way back from the compound The Official waited for me to stop crying before he asked.  
"We need to track down Darien Fawkes," he said, slowly. "The Quicksilver madness is probably about to reach a critical level."  
I nodded. "Kevin explained it to me in his last letter."  
"He explained a lot to you," The Official said. "You're probably the only person with even a rudimentary knowledge of the gland."  
"I don't do this anymore," I said. "I'm no longer in the business of human experimentation."  
He leaned over and took my hand. "I know that this is too soon," he said, "but we need Darien Fawkes. And once we find him, we need someone to take care of him."  
"My husband's dead," I said, and I started to cry again.  
He leaned over a wiped a tear off my cheek. "Don't think of him as an experiment," he said, "don't think of him as another Gloria. He's your brother in law."  
We road on for a minute in silence. "I can get you a leave of absence from the DOD," he said, "I'll get Gloria transferred to the agency so you can monitor her project. All I'm asking for is that you help train a new keeper." He looked at me, plaintively, "You're the only one who could save this man."  
  
In my mind, I thought of the letters Kevin had sent me from the compound, delivered by secret operatives who destroyed them immediately after I had read them. The details of his ordinary life, strings of numbers and menial results, the careful observations of Darien's progress, as if he were watching a lab rat waiting for signs of it's inevitable decay.  
  
I saw him only once during the months that he was there. It was our anniversary; he had a leave of absence from the project for twenty-four hours. It was the last time I ever saw his face.  
"I still haven't told him about you," he said, over dinner.  
I sat for a while, pushing the food around my plate.  
"Why not?"  
"What am I supposed to say? I haven't seen Darien for over five years, and now suddenly I've dragged him into a top secret government experiment," he fumed, drinking down a glass of wine. "What am I supposed to say, 'oh, by the way bro, I have this wife named Claire,'"  
"When are you going to tell him," I said.  
"About you? Soon."  
"No," I said, "about the gland."  
He sighed, pushing his plate away. "We're making progress on getting the gland out," he said. "I'm sure he'll be patient about it. After all, he could be in prison."  
"What if you can't figure out how to get it out?"  
He smiled, reaching across and taking my hand. "Then we can work on it together. You know more about it then anyone except me and Arnaud... you, me and Arnaud, we'll be able to get it out."  
He leaned over and kissed me, gently, on the lips.  
"You'll like my brother," he said, "he isn't like me at all."  
That night, we made love in our bed for the last time.  
  
I hope you're happy that I've stayed this long. That I've saved your project. That I've saved your brother. Maybe I've saved a little piece of you as well.  
  
If I was Darien, I would be able to remember Hamlet right now. We had a copy on our bookshelf; we'd both read it once, a long time ago, and forgotten it in the midst of DNA helixes and neuron electroconductivity and government conspiracies. I'm trying now to remember it, but I can't think. I'm trying to remember Gertrude.  
  
Your brother kissed me today.  
  
He came in, alone, to get his shot of counteragent and afterwards, as the afternoon crept into evening, we continued talking. As I listened to him, and as he drew me in, I kept trying to find the words to tell him that we couldn't be doing this, that I was still bound to you. But I couldn't find the words. He leaned in and kissed me, gently, his lips barely touching mine. After a moment he pulled away, looking startled, trying to find an excuse.  
  
"I'm sorry," he whispered, and left me sitting on the floor.  
Gertrude loved her king completely, and when he died, she learned to love his brother too. Of course things were always much easier in Shakespeare. It's easy to say, after she's dead, that Gertrude paid a fair price for falling in love with the murderous brother of he husband. But now I envy her.  
Because I'm still in love with you.  
  
Fin  
  



End file.
